France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939 (78 page)

There was, however, a point on which Beck gave in—but too timidly and too late. During the night of August 22–23 Léon Noël was instructed to make a final attempt to request that the Poles authorize the passage of the Red Army. He met with Beck on the morning of August 23. Shaken, Beck requested time think it over, then summoned Noël once again at half past noon. “During that second meeting,” wrote General Musse, “
Mr. Beck gave in
.” [Emphasis added.] He agreed to send to General Doumenc a message worded as follows: “We are certain that in the event of a common action against German aggression, a collaboration between Poland and the USSR, within technical conditions to be determined is not to be excluded.”
¹³
Would this vague statement be satisfactory to the gruff Voroshilov, allowing for the resumption of the Franco-Anglo-Soviet military talks? Could it prevent the signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov
agreement at the last minute? It was wishful thinking. Léon Noël quickly cabled it directly to Moscow, just in case, and informed the Quai d’Orsay accordingly.
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There were a few optimists. General Doumenc, as we have noted, took some time to understand the depth of the reversal that had taken place. On August 23 General Palasse, the military attaché in Moscow, still believed that “for the USSR the choice of an agreement with Germany was only a last resort and possibly a device to bring pressure for a faster conclusion to the desired coalition.”
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As for former Air Minister Pierre Cot he would tell his friend Jean Zay “one day we will go back to Russia, with whom negotiations had been carried out with incredible clumsiness, while this in no way is an excuse for its betrayal.”
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Let us move back to France and examine what was taking place in Paris. Daladier and Léger were convinced that the understanding with the USSR could still be salvaged. On August 22 at 5 p.m. Daladier held a meeting of the Council of Ministers. That was when he proposed a final threatening initiative toward Warsaw, the one that Léon Noël undertook as we have mentioned. No decision was reached on anything else. A general mobilization as suggested by Paul Reynaud and Georges Mandel? Let’s wait. What will Italy do? Couldn’t we send the Italophile de Monzie to stop her on her drift toward intervention? Let’s wait. Is England firmly committed this time to intervene if Poland is attacked? Yes, answered Jean Zay. “It’s not that certain,” replied Georges Bonnet.
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How do we stand with our air force? Guy La Chambre made an exaggeratedly optimistic statement: “Our bomber planes will come out in the fall.” Yet on August 1 Captain Stehlin had come to Paris to report on the Luftwaffe’s mobilization measures and met with General Vuillemin, who admitted, “The government is well aware of it, I am no more encouraged than I was at the time of Munich.”
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On August 23, at Bonnet’s request, Daladier organized an unofficial meeting of the members of the “Permanent Committee of National Defense.” According to de Monzie, at the time Daladier and Léger were still denying that a new partition of Poland was possible.
¹⁹
The prime minister asked three questions: 1) Could France watch Romania and Poland disappear without reacting? The answer was “no!”; 2) What means did France have to oppose this? Gamelin answered that France was ready. Darlan said the same thing. The only reservations concerned the air force;
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3) Which measures should be taken now? The military
men were requesting partial mobilization. It was up to the Cabinet to decide.

Daladier called a meeting of the Council of Ministers on August 24 at 10 a.m. Partial mobilization was approved. Daladier announced that the Poles would agree to the passage of the Red Army and answering a question from the president of the republic, Albert Lebrun, declared that an agreement with the Soviets was still possible. The illusion had not yet vanished.

The real problem was that of France’s commitments. Those in favor of “resistance”—Mandel, Reynaud, Sarraut, Campinchi, and Zay—said that intervention was required in any case if Poland was attacked even if the aggression was provoked by a Nazi revolt in Danzig. There were still a few “pacifists” like Bonnet, Marchandeau, and Guy La Chambre who were very reticent because they thought Polish concessions were possible. Zay mistakenly placed de Monzie among the “resisters.” As for Daladier he “was wrapped in a gloomy kind of mystery.”
²¹

Actually, at the ministry of public wde Monzie met with the major French
appeasers
—Paul Baudoin; Maurice Petsche, a moderate deputy from Besançon; Socialist Deputy Lazurick; the Socialist Senator Felix Gouin; the syndicalist René Belin; university chancellor Roussy; these were reinforced by Paul Faure, Marcel Déat, Jean Mistler, president of the foreign affairs commission of the Chamber and Bérenger, president of the same commission in the Senate. Monzie was in constant contact with Bonnet, who that same day offered to send him to Italy but cancelled the idea once Daladier voiced his opinion. There was also the thought, but remained as a vague idea coming from Roger Genébrier, Daladier’s cabinet director, of sending Pierre Cot on a mission to Moscow.
²²

On that same August 24, Bonnet instructed Léon Noël to “take a very insistent step with the Polish government for it to refrain from any immediate reaction in the event the Senate of the Free City announced that Danzig would become part of the Reich.”

August 25 was the day France apparently stepped into the tunnel. The walls were covered with posters announcing “the call-up of certain categories of reservists.” Once more the electric lights were dimmed, soon communist publications would be banned and censorship was instituted. Germany also cut telephone communications, making the exchange of letters between Hitler and Daladier that much more difficult. That exchange was to be, at least as far as France was concerned, the big event from August 25 to 27.

On August 25 at 5:30 p.m. Hitler summoned Ambassador Coulondre and gave him a message addressed to Daladier. He harbored, he said, no hostility toward France. He had renounced the Alsace-Lorraine. The idea of fighting France because of Poland was “extremely painful” to him.
²³
It obviously was part of his tactics to break up the potential coalition. Coulondre answered, “If you attack Poland, France with all of its forces will fight on the side of the allies.” He gave him his word as a soldier. Hitler rose for him to take his leave. Coulondre, while standing up, mentioned the world war where the winner could turn out to be…Trotsky. “He gave a start as if I had hit him in the stomach.” But the pressure on Hitler was now complete.
²⁴

Before Daladier sent in his answer we should mention a brief attempt to find a solution that would also surprise Hitler. The idea was to offer Germany and Poland a population exchange. The British agreed. Léon Noël presented the idea to Deputy Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Arciszewsky, who viewed the idea favorably. Beck agreed with the proposal but not to taking it to the Germans.
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The British then dropped the project.
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When Coulondre mentioned it, Hitler “only answered with an exclamation.”
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The important part—Daladier’s answer—was drafted on that same August 26 and transmitted at 2:50 p.m. It was a sentimental letter. “I owe it to our two peoples to say that the peace is still held in your hands alone.” The national honor of the French people, as high as that of the German people, implied France’s commitment to its Polish alliance. The crisis could be resolved “with honor and dignity.” A final attempt for a peaceful arrangement between Germany and Poland was required. “Like myself you were a fighter in the last war…Should French blood and German blood flow again as they did twenty-five years ago, each of the two peoples will fight confident in its victory, but the most certain victory will be that of destruction and barbarism.”
²⁸

Coulondre handed that letter to Hitler on the same day at 7 p.m. The Führer’s expression had “hardened.” He was acting the part, said Coulondre, who during forty minutes had “used up all the arguments, exhortations and pleas.” Was he able to move him for an instant by mentioning the women and children who were going to die? In any case, he closed saying that the entire responsibility lay fully with Poland. That was what Coulondre cabled to Daladier immediately after.
²⁹
Daladier no doubt had exaggerated expectations of the impact his letter would have. He was deeply disappointed.

The final episode of this correspondence came on August 27 at 4 p.m. Ribbentrop handed Hitler’s reply to Coulondre. It was obviously a rejection written in the Führer’s typically confused style. Hitler understood Daladier’s thinking and recognized the Alsace-Lorraine borders. As usual, he offered the history of his efforts to revise the “Diktat of Versailles.” Poland, encouraged by the French and the British, had unleashed an “intolerable terror” against the Germans living on its land. What would France do if Marseille, like Danzig, was taken away and its territory was cut in half by a corridor? It wasn’t possible for an honorable nation to see two million of its sons be mistreated close to its territory. It would be painful to him to have to fight against France but that was France’s choice. Hitler’s letter included a very serious sentence proving that the bidding was going higher: “I have made a definite demand:
Danzig and the Corridor must be returned to Germany
.”
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[Emphasis added.]

From August 27 to 30, inclusive, French diplomacy seems to fade. As Jean Zay put it, “The empty and anguished days of September 1938 were back.”
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England would handle the major negotiations. It did so alone as usual, but requested France’s support, which was given wholeheartedly but purely in a passive role. It must be said that rather than choosing the slippery context of sentimentality as Daladier did, Chamberlain, Halifax and their ambassador to Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, placed themselves squarely at the center of the problem: there had never been real negotiations between Germany and Poland and that thread had to begin.

Those negotiations have been studied in great detail and are beyond our subject matter. We shall recall that they started on August 25 and that Henderson traveled to London and returned to Berlin on the evening of the 28th. Hitler would accept the talks—he said—on condition that a Polish plenipotentiary would come to see him before the evening of the 30th. Mindful of the sad precedent of the Czechoslovak president, Hacha, on March 14, the Warsaw government refused to delegate Beck or Rydz-Smigly
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and limited itself to instructing its ambassador, Joseph Lipski, to carry on the negotiations. Furthermore, Lipski could only take the initiative on August 31 allowing Ribbentrop to tell Nevile Henderson that it was too late. Hitler wished to artificially create a situation where it would appear that Poland rather than Germany was responsible for refusing.
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Captain Stehlin was a witness to those events in Berlin, and despite additional surveillance he was able to continue his flights over Germany
until August 23 and was totally convinced that an attack was imminent, stating that he was “surprised to see that Coulondre was joining his British colleague in suggesting to the Polish ambassador to have his government agree to the German proposal of direct negotiations.”
³⁴

It actually was a British proposal that Germany had reluctantly accepted, with the intention of not allowing it to come to pass. Stehlin could not believe that this time the British position remained firm. Around August 29 and 30 “a kind of euphoria spread through the embassies and the legations,” and even among German circles. That euphoria—Coulondre used the same word—no doubt explains the decision made by Coulondre to write a personal letter to Daladier. He had met the “specialist” of France, the shady writer Friedrich Sieburg who, with tears in his eyes, told him that “the situation was worsening quickly in Germany. Hitler was hesitating, the party was adrift, the population was grumbling. Germany was supposed to attack Poland on the morning of the 26th. The Führer decided against it at the last moment.” Why not consider a conference with Hitler to revise the Treaty of Versailles?
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The ambassador then wrote to Daladier, whom he knew personally, to report on this “drift.” Hitler was backing up. “The brisk tone of the answer given to the British government was meant to cover up this weakening attitude.”… “Mr. Hitler is wondering how he can get out of the dead-end in which he placed himself.” In other words, here was Coulondre once again converted to the belief in a Hitlerian bluff. We should point to the fact that he did draw a positive conclusion: “We just must hold out, hold out, hold out.” With Danzig and the extraterritorial highway Hitler would be satisfied. Let us, therefore, be firm “to convince him that he will get nothing more with the methods he has used until now.” Coulondre gave that letter to Dayet, the consul in Frankfurt, who, like the other French consuls, was packing his bags on the ambassador’s orders and traveling to Paris by car. “It is of prime importance,” wrote Coulondre, “that these thoughts not be leaked out.” It was up to Daladier to pass his message along to Bonnet and Léger.

Suddenly, on August 31, France would once more be in the limelight because of an Italian initiative. On that day François-Poncet met with Count Ciano late in the morning. The Italian minister was very “upset” because “war in his opinion was only a matter of hours away.” The Italian people were satisfied with the nonbelligerent status adopted by their government. Mussolini, for his part, felt extremely humiliated. His armaments
were inadequate. He was unable to honor the Pact of Steel and be at Germany’s side. In his almost daily correspondence with Hitler at the time, the latter took a patronizing tone. “The Duce is nervous. He wants to do something,” wrote Ciano on August 29.
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“A new event” was required, he told François-Poncet. The ambassador sent a cable at 12:15 p.m. to report on this rather vague conservation.